A versatile organizer of the Harlem Renaissance (for Black History Month)
Written: Feb 03 '05 (Updated Feb 03 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: plays, section introductions
Cons: the poetry (only occupying four pages)
The Bottom Line: This volume makes available a great deal of previously unpublished writings of one of the most interesting 20th-century African American writers.
Stephen_Murray's Full Review: The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harle...
From the retrospect of 1939, Alain Locke, who had edited The New Negro, a 1925 anthology, wrote: "It was the bright young talents of the [19]20s who went cosmopolite when they were advised to go racial, who went exhibitionist instead of going documentarian, who got jazz-mad and cabaret-crazy instead of getting folk-wise and sociologically sober." A leader of the younger (than Locke) generation, who epitomized individualism and aspirations for producing art rather than uplift was Wallace Thurman (1902-1934) .
The Author
Thurman was born and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, moving to Los Angeles as an adolescent. In the unpublished "Notes on a Stepchild" Thurman portrays a precocious child suffering from frequent illness and from both inter- and intra-racial prejudice against those with his very black skin. While a journalism student at UCLA in 1923, Thurman discovered the work of the Nietzchean iconoclastic H. L. Mencken, and founded The Outlet a West Coast "New Negro" magazine that lasted six months.
Moving to New York on 7 Sept. 1925 "with nothing but his nerve" as Theophilus Lewis recollected, and being arrested for indecency in a subway toilet a few days later, within four months he was editor of The Messenger, one of the most important African American publications. He became part of what he called a "niggerati" that included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Aaron Douglas. He published early work by all of them. He also wrote (under various names) for True Story, some scripts for "Adults Only" movies, and worked as an editor for mainstream—i.e., white (downtown from Harlem)—publishers. Nonetheless, Thurman was chronically in debt, considerably worsened by the one issue of Fire!! , an anti-assimilationist celebration of jazz, paganism, androgyny, black beauty, and homoeroticism (the last especially in Richard Bruce Nugent’s "Smoke, lilies, jade") he produced in 1926. Thurman’s story form it, "Cordelia the Crude" became the basis of a successful Broadway play, "Harlem" that he coauthored (with white playwright William Jourdan Rapp) in 1929.
Earlier the same year his first novel, The Blacker the Berry, focused on the problems of a middle-class dark-skinned girl, Emma Lou, encounters with lighter-skinned Negroes in the Midwest, at the University of Southern California, and even in "da Promised Land" of Harlem. She suffers discrimination even there from lighter-skinned owners of business and housing. At various points she attempts to straighten her hair and lighten her skin, to rebel and consort with other dark-skinned pariahs, and finally accepts a white mentor’s suggestion she accept herself as an individual. (There is also a doomed homosexual side plot.) Also in 1929 Thurman (disastrously) tried marriage with a woman for six months.
In addition to being a vehicle for presenting his views on art, race, and a quasi-Nietzchean rationale for individualism, the 1932 roman a clef, Infants of the Spring, Thurman's second novel, satirized and seemingly attempted to bury the Harlem Renaissance epoch in which he had been a leader. Most of it is set in the "Niggerati Manor" (267 W. 136th St.) in which Thurman and other artistes lives in 1926-27. Raymond Taylor, the earnest but too easily debauched by drink character that is a version of himself believes that Oscar Wilde is the greatest man who ever lived, also revering Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Whitman. is enamored with a masculine white sailor (Stephen Jorgeson modeled on Harald Stefansson, who had been Thurman’s lover at the time written about in the novel). Thurman satirized everyone, but was especially contemptuous of the Alain Locke character, the would be Queen Bee of the New Negro.
Thurman died in the same Welfare Island City Hospital he had exposed in a muckraking novel(The Interne) in 1934 of tuberculosis exacerbated by alcoholism.
The Collection
The collection of Thurman writings edited by Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III and published in 2003 by Rutgers University Press, includes excerpts from the three published novels (totaling 42 pages from them). It also includes the two extant plays, "Harlem" (along with various pieces about its genesis, and the story, "Cordelia the Crude" in which the pivotal character was introduced) and "Jeremiah the Magnificent." The latter is a very thinly fictionalized portrait of Marcus Garvey and the downfall of his Black Star Fleet that was supposed to take African Americans "home" to Africa.
In the original story, Thurman introduced Cordelia as follows: "Cordelia was a potential prostitute, meaning that although she has not yet realized the moral import of her wanton promiscuity not become mercenary, she had, nevertheless, become quite blasé and bountiful in the matter of bestowing sexual favors upon persuasive and likely young men" (showing both that the extent of sexual liberation of even the most advanced "New Negroes" was not great and something of the vague and Thurman's "dicty" phrase-turning). In addition to rent parties, a mother devoted to that "old-time religion," and the sexual rejection of a member of the "Talented Tenth" that was raising up the race, there are number-runner gangsters, and a frame-up that would not be out of place in another kind of noir.
Like Garvey, Jeremiah the Magnificent was ensnarled with mail fraud investigators and undercut by rapaciously self-enriching business associates (and, also like Garvey, traded in a loyal wife for a younger one before being deported). There is also a quite sympathetic, though bemused, essay about Garvey in a not previously published collection of essays about Harlem, Aunt Hagar's Children (including the autobiographical "Notes of a Stepchild" and a piece on "The Negro Literary Renaissance") that includes sympathetic biographical analyses of three "colored" leaders (the one on Garvey, plus and even-more-surprising (given how urban and avant-garde Thurman was) one on Booker T. Washington, and one on Frederick Douglas, who was less known and revered in the 1920s than he is now).
In addition to the often-anthologized "Cordelia the Crude" (from the legendary one issue of Fire!, there is one other short story (first published in 1926 in The Messenger. Some might consider "Grist in the Mill" as agit-prop, but I see it as another instance of Thurman's sardonic take on race relations. It involves a transfusion of "black blood" saving the life of ultra-racial purist Colonel Charles Summers. When he found out "an inkly blackness enveloped him" as he "began to writhe and wriggle upon the floor" trying to rub off the internal taint.
There are about fifty pages of book reviews and literary essays. These include mixed reviews for Carl Van Vechten's notoriously named novel Nigger Heaven, Langston Hughes's poetry, and Rudolf Fisher's Walls of Jericho, plus a survey of New Negro poets (Claude McKay receives the only unequivocal endorsement) and withering criticism of Quicksand, a very proper novel written by W. E. B. DuBois's secretary, Jessie Fausset and of Du Bois's advocacy of celebrating the black bourgeoisie rather than writing about low-down (and proto down-low) rural and urban lifeways about which Du Bois was ashamed ("Negro Artists and the Negro"). The antagonism between Du Bois and the "niggerati" is partly explained in the book's very academic introduction (slighting the sexual politics that extended to DuBois's daughters marriage to poet Countee Cullen who already had a male primary partner... who went along on the honeymoon).
Although Thurman tried most literary forms, he was a lousy poet. There are only seven extant poems (and these are mostly extracted from letters to Langston Hughes). They fit on four pages. Thurman was a lively correspondent, and there are nearly 80 pages of letters from him (the plurality of them written to Langston Hughes). There are also 50 pages of essays published in various magazines about Harlem, including one on rent parties. (The play "Harlem" is mostly set during preparations for a rent party and ends during the party put on by Cordelia's father, though significant action in it occurs in another apartment.)
Having read the two black novels (The Interne has only white characters and has long been out of print), I was most interested in the two plays and in essays relating to the literary politics. Thurman highly valued Claude McKay's fiction, in addition to praising him as the best of the New Negro poets. Jean Toomer's Cane is the only Renaissance novel Thurman was certain was a masterpiece. One of Thurman's poets celebrates Toomer's genius, and in "Negro Artists and the Negro" he wrote sarcastically of the Harlem vogue, among other ways in regard to the reception of Cane:
Cane was really pre-renaissance, as it was published too soon to be lifted into the best-seller class merely because its author was a Negro. And, as Waldo Frank forewarned in his introduction to Cane, Jean Toomer was not a Negro artist, but an artist who had lost "lesser identities in the great well of life." His book, therefore, was of little interest to sentimental whites or to Negroes with an inferiority complex to camouflage. Both the personality of the author and the style of his book were above the heads of these groups.
The edginess and frustration about being read for either documentary value or to provide "positive role models" run through Thurman's writings about writers, including in the novel Infants of the Spring. In an oblique defense of that novel, he wrote:
Negroes, themselves, resent any novel, no matter how meritorious, which does not deal with what they call "the better class of Negroes." Meaning the semi-literate bourgeoisie to whom keeping up with the Joneses implies doing nothing of which bourgeois whites might disapprove.
Thurman and his friends wrote about less refined Negroes and were castigated by "race men" leaders, especially Du Bois. Another example of Thurman's sarcastic style is provided in this 1928 riff about Thurman's bête noire , or from Thurman's place on the color spectrum, bête jaune):
Dr. Du Bois is one of the outstanding Negroes of this or any other generation. he has served his race well; so well, in fact, that the artist in him has been stifled in order that the propagandist may thrive. No one will object to this being called noble and necessary sacrifice, but the days for such sacrifices are gone. The time has come now when the Negro artist can be his true self and pander to the stupidities of no one, either white or black.
Conclusion
The editors' introductions to the various groupings of kinds of writings are very informative. Their introduction to the volume places Thurman in the context of views about the social construction of race, racial identity-formation (now and then), literary canon-formation, and the historical/literary discourses celebrating Harlem Renaissance writings and those attacking or dismissing them. Ways in which Thurman prefigured the rage and political incorrectnesses of Richard Wright are particularly foregrounded, along with Thurman's particularly deep-seated feelings of otherness from blacks and white. (James Baldwin is not mentioned there, but is mentioned in the introduction to excerpts from the novels.)
It would have been useful to include a glossary of 1920s slang Thurman inscribed (such terms as "hincty," "monkey-chaser," and "four-flusher"). However, the chronology of Thurman's life is helpful. And other than the rest of the three novels, the editors seem to have collected everything of any interest that Thurman published plus more than half of the contents of the collection that they published for the first time. Not all Thurman's writing was top-flight, but almost all of it is includes interesting perspectives and observations of uneasy African Americans in the first third of the 20th century.
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The best introduction to the writings of the Harlem Renaissance is the Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader , edited by David Levering Lewis. For an overview of the players and their interconnections with patrons, see Steven Watson's Harlem Renaissance. In Black History Months past, I have also written about Eric Walrond's collected writings, Winds Can Wake Up the Dead (including "Tropic Death" which Thurman especially lauded);
Rudolf Fisher's stories City of Refuge (the title story was especially lauded by Thurman) and Fisher's two novels, The Conjure Man Dies and Walls of Jericho;
and, from the next generation, a number of books written by and about Chester Himes, plus Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
BTW, the characters in the plays used the n-word often, though not as often as in Claude McLay's Harlem Glory, the next book I'm reviewing (which also features number runners and rent parties in the post-Renaissance Depression era).
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